Page 5 of Each Their Own Devil (Our Lady of Fire #3)

“The faithful must strike down their enemies with the sword of truth, for only through sacrifice can wisdom be revealed.”— The Book of Open Doors , Book II: The Trials of Passage

Nicolas was not fond of meeting with the Second, and he was certain the feeling was mutual.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come?” Aleja mumbled, as Nicolas slipped from the bed. The cover of night was not just practical; it allowed him to avoid the prying eyes of the librarians and the other Dark Saints. A visit to the Second always raised questions, and he preferred to keep this meeting—and the burden it carried—his alone until he heard what the Second had to say.

“Stay here. He’s not pleased with you.”

“He’s not pleased with you ,” Aleja retorted. Though her eyes and the room were dark, he could track their movement by the faint glint of candlelight reflected in them. As she rose, he placed his hands on her shoulders, gently guiding her back to the mattress.

“It’s part of my duties. I’ll be back before dawn.”

Aleja argued, as Nicolas knew she would, but perhaps she realized her presence would only remind the Second of her defiance. Within the half hour, Nicolas was traveling alone, trudging up the winding paths in the foothills on foot. Flying would have been quicker and less tiring, but this felt more fitting somehow—more deliberate.

He had not spoken to the Second since Aleja’s bargain had revived him, but fragments of strange, dream-like memories lingered from his time beneath the mountain. He had been dead, but not truly.

And he had dreamed.

The details escaped him now, but they hardly mattered. The themes were the same in every story—human or fey, Otherlander or Astraelis. There was forbidden knowledge, coveted and pursued at a cost, and there was always a betrayal—a choice that set the world spinning toward its reckoning. The chalice fills, the chalice drains.

I DIDN’T THINK YOU’D COME AGAIN SO SOON , the Second rumbled as Nicolas entered the warm red light of his chambers. The pool beneath which the Second slept was still, though a few swifts, disturbed by Nicolas’s presence, erupted from their roosts and fled toward the dim light of the cave’s entrance.

“I wasn’t eager to speak with you again,” Nicolas said, because the Second would already know it was the truth. “But the Astraelis seem to believe that our world is about to end.”

The Second paused for a moment. Nicolas listened to the water dripping into the pool, each drop echoing like the racing of a heartbeat. There was a faint pang in his chest, though the curse had been lifted by Aleja’s new bargain. HOW DO YOU PLAN TO WIN THIS WAR, KNOWING ONE?

“I thought you would be kind enough to tell me,” Nicolas replied with a bored wave of his hand. “If what they call the Avaddon is coming, then perhaps I should spend my last few weeks drinking wine and laughing with my wife.”

I WARN YOU AGAINST ALLOWING THIS RUMOR TO SPREAD ACROSS THE HIDING PLACE. THE ASTRAELIS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN HOW TO WEAPONIZE LIES.

The words caught Nicolas off guard, and he opened his mouth slightly to speak before clamping it shut again. “Are you asking me to suppress knowledge?”

I AM TELLING YOU NOT TO WASTE THE MIGHT OF MY MAGIC ON A DECEIT AND A DISTRACTION. ENSURE YOUR WIFE FULFILLS HER BARGAIN.

“My wife will fulfill her bargain either way.”

SHE IS STILL ONE OF THE SECOND’S SOLDIERS. IF SHE FAILS TO ACT IN THE INTEREST OF THE HIDING PLACE, I TRUST YOU WILL RESPOND ACCORDINGLY.

It was useless, really, to indulge in a show of strength in front of the Second—there was no world in which Nicolas could hope to escape if the creator of the Hiding Place decided to quash his current Knowing One and appoint one that would be less of a pain in the ass. But Nicolas still couldn’t help the darkness that swarmed around him. “Aleja is as loyal to the Hiding Place as any of us. Do you have anything else to say, or can I get back to commanding my armies?”

GO, KNOWING ONE. AND IF YOU ARE WISE, TAKE MY ADVICE. TREAT THE AVADDON AS A DISTRACTION MEANT TO WEAKEN OUR RESOLVE. For a moment, there was only silence, save for the endless dripping of water. Then the Second’s voice rolled through the chamber again. DO NOT LET THEIR LIES POISON YOU.

Nicolas stared into the glowing pool; the tension in his shoulders must have betrayed him. “Their lies,” he muttered. “Or yours?”

DO YOU TRUST YOUR ENEMY’S COMMAND MORE THAN YOUR OWN?

Nicolas was already uneasy. In fact, that was an understatement—standing in front of the Second often felt like lying before a guillotine held by a masked executioner, who claimed that he would be spared or killed based on a complex set of rules spoken in a language Nicolas did not understand. The shadows trembling around him were meant to appear flippant, but they betrayed the fluttering in his stomach. Never in all his centuries in the Hiding Place had the Second tried to silence Otherlanders. While capricious and cruel at times, the Second had been the being to teach humans magic—he had been the one to give them weapons they could eventually turn on the Astraelis and Otherlanders alike. Knowledge and free will were the two founding principles of the Hiding Place.

“I will take your advice into consideration,” Nicolas said.

IT WOULD BE IN YOUR BEST INTEREST.

“Is that a threat?”

THE THREAT IS HANDING THE ASTRAELIS A VICTORY. GO, KNOWING ONE. WE HAVE TOLERATED EACH OTHER ENOUGH.

In Nicolas’s mind, the masked executioner’s fingers twitched around the rope holding the blade above his head. Pressing further would only anger the Second. Besides, a new thought made the flutter in his stomach beat double-time. The only ones outside of Val and the circle of Saints who knew about the Avaddon were the librarians, who spoke and read languages no one but the Second understood. Had they already come to see him?

When Nicolas walked back into the dawn—unusually golden for the Hiding Place at this hour—the distant tree line was shriveled and black from where Aleja had once set loose her magic.

In all her time in the Hiding Place, Aleja did not think she had ever seen Nicolas fall asleep before her—not until tonight, after he had ordered the librarians away from their quarters. The weight of the Second’s denial of the Avaddon, combined with Nicolas’s suspicion that the Second had been communicating with the librarians without their knowledge, gnawed at her.

She closed her eyes and tried to picture the details of a painting, as she used to do when she couldn’t sleep back in college. But it was as if someone else was in the room, tugging at Aleja’s ankle like a monster under the bed that had grown bold while the Knowing One slept.

As she slipped from under the covers, Nicolas turned toward the empty space she had left behind but did not wake. In the darkness, Aleja had to root around for the bone wrapped in a scrap of linen cloth. The magic inside of it buzzed in her ears, as if she had disturbed a flower bed full of bees. She turned back to Nicolas, but one of his wings draped over his upper body, hiding his face. It was oddly humanizing to see one of the Knowing One’s bare feet sticking out from the bottom of the sheets.

Aleja palmed the bone and padded quietly down to the throne room, where two chairs composed of sharp angles and bat wing-like silhouettes dominated the circular space. Aleja listened for Garm, but he’d gone to help Bonnie earlier and hadn’t returned.

She plopped onto the throne on the left and turned the bone in her hands. It again vibrated like a cell phone on silent mode. “Violet?” Aleja whispered, feeling foolish before the word even left her mouth. Instead, she closed her eyes and, like every other time she had channeled with an Unholy Relic, dipped into a memory that was not her own.

The room she found herself in was more of a surprise than if she’d been thrown into the Astraelis realm. A large poster for whatever punk band Violet was into that week hung over a dorm room bed. A tattooed girl with a lavender mohawk screamed into the microphone, surrounded by the bed’s pastel baroque opulence—a gilded pink plastic monstrosity that Aleja had helped her drag across campus from a yard sale two neighborhoods away.

A camera flashed as the Violet of the memory took Aleja’s picture. She was one of the only people Aleja had ever met who preferred a bulky camera to her phone.

“Please, don’t,” Aleja said, burying her face in her hands. Three months ago, she’d cut her bangs after an ill-advised two hours of Pinterest browsing, and the dark red strands trapped beneath her fingers poked into her eyes.

“How will we learn from our mistakes if we don’t document them? Fine. The camera is gone and can’t hurt you anymore. Did you submit your scholarship application, by the way?”

This had been routine for them in the first year of their friendship. Aleja had grown up in a family that believed she was destined to die young, and no one had ever taught her how to be an adult. Violet, on the other hand, had been thrown out of her family home at seventeen for coming out as gay and had been forced to grow up far too quickly.

“Yes, Mother, thank you.”

“Well, that’s great, because we have plans.”

“What? We do?” Aleja asked. Aside from a brief stint in the fencing club, her social circle was limited to Violet and her cousin, Paola, who was almost always busy with her new caretaking company.

“Yep!” Violet’s eyes narrowed as she looked Aleja up and down. “I suppose you’re dressed appropriately. Come on, we can leave now.”

Aleja’s weak protests were in vain, even as she grumbled that she had reading to finish for her Politics in Art class. It wasn’t so much that Violet could be annoyingly persistent, but that Aleja couldn’t bring herself to say no. Invitations from her cousins had always been rare, and the novelty of having a friend who dragged her to movies and game nights in the student center still hadn’t worn off.

Fifteen minutes later, they were shivering in the northwestern rain as Violet led Aleja off campus and into the city. With the winter damp, few people were on the streets, huddling under the awnings of thrift shops and bars. Twilight at this time of year was almost uniformly blue, softened by a layer of freezing mist. Aleja assumed Violet was steering her to the wine bar where her crush worked the Tuesday shift, but they turned unexpectedly into a residential neighborhood full of Queen Anne homes that looked like elaborately decorated cakes.

“I thought you wanted to stalk Simone tonight,” Aleja said.

“I’m not stalking her.” Violet sighed and checked her phone. “I just like to be in her vicinity in case she wants to glance in my direction. But, alas, this surprise is for you, my dear Alejandra. Oh! That must be the house.”

“What house? What’s going on, Vi? Has our entire friendship been an elaborate murder plot that culminates tonight?”

“I was introduced to this couple at a hiking meetup, and we got to talking. Turns out they own one of those antique shops that’s hardly ever open because the rich need something to pretend to do with their time. Anyway, they’re big art lovers and brought a few pieces over from Italy. They’re storing them at home while they wait for appraisals. I asked if I could invite you over. Well, I didn’t so much ask as kind of demanded it.”

Aleja stopped in her tracks, unmindful of her hood slipping off and the rain soaking into her dark red hair. “Say more.”

“Why don’t I just show you?”

The Aleja of the present could remember the rest of the evening clearly, even without the use of the Unholy Relic. The Cooke’s collection had been small but precious: a tiny medieval annunciation scene from Siena, painted in a blue pigment so bright it was almost painful to look at, even six hundred years after being laid on the canvas. A worn board from Bologna still depicted the Virgin Mary gazing serenely from the past, her enormous dark eyes full of tenderness.

But that wasn’t what Aleja remembered most about that evening. It was how Violet had patiently listened as Aleja pointed out the symbolism of flowers, birds, and hand gestures, asking surprisingly astute questions for someone who had never shown interest in the subject before. When they eventually went to the wine bar after all, the conversation continued, diving into the differences and similarities between art and photography—a topic Violet had a better grasp of.

It was one of the few conversations Aleja had shared outside of a classroom where her cheeks didn’t burn with embarrassment each time she spouted another obscure fact or wandered down a strange tangent. In that moment, she first understood the sort of friendship she had only read about in books, where one person would dive in front of a blade for another.

Violet Timmons went missing nine months later.

As the memory faded, Aleja felt a wound in her gut—but it wasn’t one where she had taken a blade for Violet. Violet had held the hilt of the sword herself.

Aleja awoke to the sound of horns.

Nicolas was already on his feet, dragging on a piece of leather armor that had been tossed haphazardly by the bed. “Get up. Armor on. Now!” he shouted. Garm’s bark echoed through the cavernous throne room below, reverberating like there was an entire pack of hellhounds beneath them.

“Is this a drill?” Aleja asked, still half-asleep after hours of tossing and turning. She stumbled out of bed, sheets tangled around her legs.

“An Astraelis convoy has pushed through our wards.”

No. That couldn’t be right. Aleja tried to think straight, but it felt like her brain had awoken as an empty station, full of static. Her boots were on before she realized she’d reached for them. The Messenger hadn’t contacted her. The Astraelis already had the Third. Bringing him here without knowing how to kill the Second was useless, unless?—

“They want to take Val back,” she said, racing after Nicolas down the stairs. She had to take them two at a time to match his stride.

The throne room below was occupied for the first time by someone Aleja hadn’t expected: Taddeas, who was motioning for Garm to calm down. It was a useless gesture. In his hellhound form, Garm pawed at the ground like a bull preparing to charge, dark ropes of saliva dripping from his jowls.

“What’s the word?” Nicolas commanded.

“We’re not sure yet. Only one scout has reached us. There was a skirmish at the wards on the western border, but she escaped on an Avisai,” Taddeas said.

“Is the dragon still here?” Nicolas asked.

“Yes. It’s prepared for two fliers.”

“Good.”

They met no one as they raced through the palace. Aleja’s undone bootlaces slapped against the stone floors, the sound drowned out by Garm’s heavy rhythmic pants. Violet could have warned her. Violet could have fucking warned her. Instead, she had sent a memory to lower Aleja’s guard.

Violet was going to burn.

“What kind of defenses do we have around the palace?” Aleja asked. “If they make it through the Hiding Place…”

“They’re not going to have an easy time of it. The palace has its own wards, and Bonnie has been working with the surrounding forests,” Nicolas said.

“What’s the plan here? Explain it to me like I just became a Dark Saint a week ago,” she pressed, as they reached the entrance that led to the rose gardens. The gardens had finally recovered from Aleja’s fire, though their flowers still grew in unnervingly vibrant shades of red and gold, as if fertilized by the flames.

One of the great dark dragons, an Avisai, clawed into the soil near Bonnie’s cabin. A slash marred one of its leathery wings, the pale pink line stark against its black hide. Its tail swept through Bonnie’s plump cabbages, sending them flying.

The scout Taddeas had spoken of stumbled forward, clutching her elbow. Red streaks poured through her fingers, but her eyes remained steady as she ran toward Nicolas. “They’ve got Thrones with them. The attackers…they didn’t have an objective. At least, not any we could tell. They just wanted to slaughter us.”

“We’re going,” Nicolas said sharply. “Tad, Aleja, on the Avisai.”

“Where are the others?” Aleja asked.

“Bonnie is still in the woods. I have no idea whether she knows or not. Orla is surely on her way to the fight.”

Aleja had only ridden an Avisai a few times, but there was a strange familiarity as she threw one of her heels into the stirrups and pulled herself up the dragon’s body. These reins were not as comfortable as Nicolas’s shadows, but at least Taddeas’s presence at her back was sturdy. She could feel his heart beating in double-time, obvious even through his armor.

It occurred to Aleja in that moment that she was going to battle willingly.

The Avisai rose with a few uneven wingbeats, favoring its right side. Aleja’s inner balance tipped, and for a horrible moment, she thought she might slip off, if not for Taddeas’s grip on her waist.